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Ants Use Pedometers to Find Home
Ant writes "New Scientist (a short video clip included) reports that desert ants have an internal pedometer that keeps track of how many steps they take, according to a new study. The insects seem to rely on this system to find their way back to the nest after foraging. Other insects may also possess this pedometer-like system. Some types of ants appear to use visual cues or leave scent trails to find their way home. But desert ants have a remarkable ability to retrace their steps from their nesting site even though they travel on flat terrain that is devoid of landmarks, and any odors quickly fade in the hot temperatures."
Wouldn't it be fun to give the ants little shoes to make their legs longer? That would screw 'em up pretty good.
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It's actually a surprisingly complex system. They not only measure how much distance they've covered, but also every turn they've made. They basically "remember" a complete log of their journey, and are able to reset it every time they return to the nest.
But it involves massive amounts of alcohol for it to work properly.
Commenly called the beer scooter, it is a mechanism that guides you safley home to your bed, no matter how far away or how drunk you get. Its side effects can be unfortunate though as unexplained cuts and bruises plus a bank account severly depleted of funds are commen occurances upon awakening.
From TFA, the video of the ant with stilts (worth a watch):
http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/av/dn94 36.mpg
Thought it was pretty neat; the ant begins to look like a spider with the longer legs. The video didn't seem to have any additional bearing to the study, though. You'd need to read TFA for how the stilts helped in their conclusion.
One of the few zoological fields were you can chop off your subjects legs without needing to sign any legal paperwork!
They should have constructed a mini treadmill (complete with moving walls) --seriously-- to see if the ants with normal legs still walk the same distance for a reward. That would really drive there point home.
... I learned from SimAnt
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
I'm wondering which drug you have to take to come up with the idea to tie stilts onto ants? This just sounds like something a drunk guy would come up with, except that that normally ends with someone loosing some fingers and teeth, not a scientific article. Of course, both results have the same attractive results with women.
It's been a while since I worked on this, but these idea have been propagated through networking protocols for years. When I was in University at Dalhousie I spent quite a bit of time on a directed study of somethink called the 'AntNet Routing Protocol'.
:-)
The idea was based on the pheramone trails left behind whne ants seek food. You see, one ant leaves behind a trail, not a big one, but a small scent to be picked-up by other ants. When it finds food, it will retrace it's steps backwards and double the intesity of the pheramone trail. If another ant happens upon a trail, it will follow the trail to the food and increase the trail's intensity again. If the trail ever ends without a prize, ants look around to try and pick-up the trail again. Simple concept, right?
Adapting this behaviour from ants to packets on a network was easy. You had ants that walk forward and ants that walk backwards. Forward ants would collect hostnames, IP address and time stamps as they passed through any PC and kept going to their host. Backward ants updated the routing table when they retraced their steps. If any route had a lower cost (latency) then the entry already in the routing table, then an updated entry was posted. There was also a hidden advantage to all this - if, for any reason, a node went down or dropped off the network it was easily and quickly detected. Furthermore if a link went down, alternate routes were already in place if you kept double-layered routing table... quick, easy and fast network response times were the result. Consider time stamps like a tick on a pedometer...
In case you're wondering, all computers on the network ran NTP to sync the time and give us one less hassle to worry about (this could be easily incorporated if need-be).
My main area of research was to figure-out where and when the Ants started to impeed the network instead of help it. I found it to be a function of the number of discovery ants versus time and nodes on the network... some pretty rough math ensued from what I remember, but the time delta between discovery ants was paramount in any effective benefit to the network.
Food for thought... or to the trail with the most ants.
I don't have a subscription to read the original article, but the glossy schtick pointed to in the original post was pretty weak: "we mutilated ants and they couldn't find their way home, and if I buy fish it won't rain on monday, so therefore they have a pedometer hidden inside their gasters!". Hopefully the original has more actual science.
Silver ants (they look more like they are chrome-plated than silver) also live in the Sahara. They come out at the hottest time of day, when all predators are hiding, and they are extremely reflective. They have a special gait that allows them to keep half their feet off the sand in the shadow of their bodies, and they keep switching off so their feet don't cook. They move about in a fairly normal search pattern, but when they find something they run directly back to the nest without retracing their original route! Although they are believed to have good vision, their environment contains almost no visual cues - one sand dune's pretty much like another - and they will pass through territory they haven't seen on the way back to the nest.
Silver ants are also very hive-oriented or "altruistic". Individual foragers will go past their survival distance looking for food, but they turn around and come back so that their dead bodies are within the survival distance and can be recovered by other foragers. That way, if there is a food/water source that is further out than an ant could travel without such resources, they will still find it and use it.
All this is from memory and the wiki article is lame. If anybody has some good links for silver ants please post!